Computer History Museum

And you thought people who repaired old cars were nuts!

There’s a project to restore old computers for the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

Computer game models real-world epidemics

The World of Warcraft computer game has provided a way for scientists to study the spread of an epidemic. WoW had its own epidemic. A fictional virus among the game’s characters spread from a minor group to most of the world. The accidental strength and infectiousness of the virus is a valuable tool for researchers. Their study is written up in September’s The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal.

There are 6.5 million players, who provide real-world randomness by making decisions for their characters: what to do, where to go.

The scientists were able to monitor how quickly the disease spread and where to, while assessing the players’ individual responses to the outbreak. The particular features of the game, such as the many hours players around the world dedicate to it and the emotional investment they put into their online alter egos, offer scientists a tantalisingly close match to real social conditions.

As the virus spread, very real challenges emerged, such as the failure of quarantine measures, further transmission by character’s pets and the existence of “immune” characters, who act as carriers, passing the virus to others while failing to succumb to symptoms.

World of Warcraft is a “massive multiplayer online role-playing game” (MMORPG).

Arctic ice reaches a new low in historic times

The Arctic ice-pack has fallen below its previous nadir of September 2005, formerly the lowest area on record, and it’s still melting.

“During the first week in July, the Arctic sea ice started to disappear at rates we had never seen before,” said Sheldon Drobot, who leads the Arctic Regional Ice Forecasting System group at the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research, CCAR.The group at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s aerospace engineering sciences department is the only group in the world making seasonal Arctic sea ice forecasts based on probability. Arctic sea ice researchers pay particular attention to the months of September and March because they generally mark the annual minimum and maximum sea ice extents respectively, said Drobot. The record low September minimum for sea ice, set in 2005, is 2.15 million square miles, Drobot said.

For 2007, the most likely minimum extent is 1.96 million square miles, he said. But there is a 25 percent chance the September sea ice extent will shrink even more – to 1.88 million square miles – said Drobot, and even a five percent chance it will fall to 1.75 million square miles, he said. Arctic sea ice is “one of the better predictors of climate change on Earth,” Drobot said. “There will probably be about two-thirds as much sea this September as there was 25 years ago, a good indication that something significant is happening with the climate.”

For more stories about polar ice, please see

• “Dude, where’s my ice shelf?” (Dec. 2006)
• “Ross Ice Shelf break-up in Antarctic,” (Dec. 2006)
• “Wilkins Ice Shelf collapses in Antarctica” (March 2008)